1. I started looking at Alexander M. Ščerbak's "Reconstrucing the
Manchu-Tungusic Proto-language" (2012) tonight. It lists sample
proto-forms divided into six semantic categories. I only have time to
discuss the first, "Terms for Day, Night, Month, and Year" from a
Jurchen/Manchu (J/M) perspective.

1a. *ineŋī 'day'

J/M and Oroqen are the only languages cited with -ŋg-. J/M
have hardened intervocalic *-ŋ- to a prenasalized stop. This
seems in line with the fortition of initial *ŋ- in Manchu gala
'hand' from Ščerbak's*ŋāla.

Jin Qizong reads Jurchen

'hand'

as <nga.la> ngala.

However, the vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters has a Chinese
transcription *xa la pointing to gala [ʁala] c. 1500.

<GOLD.un> alcun (or ancun?) 'gold'
(originally spelled with a single character <GOLD>?)

Perhaps *alcun > *ancun > *aɲcun > *ajcun
> *ajsyn > Manchu aisin [ajɕin]. But then why
does have Manchu have an unrelated word alcu 'the
concave side of a toy made from an animal's ankle bone' with the -lcu
sequence that became -isi- in 'gold'? Absolute regularity would
demand that alcu is either a loanword or originated from
something other than *alcu: i.e., Manchu developed a new -lcu
after the old one became -isi. Rozycki (1983: 27) identified alcu
as a loanword in Tungusic from Mongolic, so a workaround to explain -lcu
in terms of sound laws is unnecessary in that case. But what of, say,
Manchu kalcun 'spirit' which has no Mongolic source? Why didn't
it become †kaisin?

The fronting of the second vowel is a problem, as Manchu does have
words with isu and aisu: e.g., gisun
(not †gisin) 'word' and aisuri (not †aisiri)
'a kind of bird'. The 'missing link'
form in Alchuka has a second vowel that is neither palatal nor
labial: anʃïn.

The palatal c is also a problem, as Turkic and Mongolic have
t, and the original vowel of the second syllable was not
palatal, so this is not a case of *ti becoming ci (a
change which didn't happen in Jurchen and wouldn't happen until Manchu).

I wonder if the word was borrowed independently by Turkic, Mongolic
or Tungusic from different varieties of some fourth type of language -
perhaps Xiongnu or Rouran.

2. Today I found the Pyu phrase tiṁ priṅ·ḥ kdaṅ· 'LOC city
?' (27.6) which at first glance appears to have double case marking. kdaṅ·
ooks like the second half of ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ· 'with, including'. But
'with in the city' makes no sense. Moreover, ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ·
precedes nouns: e.g., ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ· saḥ 'with sons' (16.4A).
Maybe kdaṅ· does not modify priṅ·ḥ 'city'. Maybe kdaṅ·
even has nothing to do with ṅit·ṁ kdaṅ·.

3. I am not sure how to write kdaṅ· in phonological
notation. I used to take it at face value as /k.daŋ/ with a period
indicating a potential schwa. But lately I think it might be ambiguous.

It is unclear if *schwa or some other minimal vowel contrasted with
zero after preinitials. The above scenario assumes such a contrast
existed but was not indicated in the script (except indirectly if a
following consonant was lenited).

kt-type voiceless-voiceless sequences are absent from the
12th century Kubyaukgyi text, suggesting that /kt/ may have merged with
/kət/.

The sequence ktha is hypothetical; the only instance of kth-
in the entire corpus is kthor·ḥ '?' (27.6).

Aspirates are rare in Pyu. Aspiration after stops may not be
phonemic: e.g., kthor·ḥ might be /ktorH/ rather than /ktʰorH/
or /kətʰorH/. (It cannot be /kətorH/ because an intervocalic /t/ would
voice to [d], and the word would have been spelled †kdor·ṃḥ
[kəðorH].)

/rH/ may have been voiceless [r̥] or [r] preceded by a vowel with
phonation and/or a tone.

1. Japanese 蝦蛄 shako 'Oratosquilla
oratoria' is a strange word. It is the only Japanese word I
know of with sh- corresponding to standard Mandarin x-.
It looks like a recent borrowing from Mandarin 蝦蛄 xiāgū, itself
an interesting word for reasons I won't go into here. Yet shako
ends in -o like a Sino-Japanese borrowing from Middle Chinese
rather than -u, though I doubt Middle Chinese is relevant here.
In short, the word seems as if it mixes borrowing patterns:

How was this word borrowed? When was it first attested? I presume it
must have displaced a Japanese word since shako live in
Japanese waters.

3.7.9:45: I should have read the
Japanese Wikipedia article on shako before asking those
questions. Going by what it says - I have no other references on hand -
it seems the resemblance to Mandarin 蝦蛄 xiāgū is fortuitous.

The Edo period name for shako was shakunage because
when boiled, it turned purple like a shakunage
flower(Rhododendron subg. Hymenanthes). Shakunage is
spelled as 石楠花 <ROCK CAMPHOR FLOWER> or 石南花 <ROCK SOUTH
FLOWER>. I suspect that even though the spellings could be taken as
meaningful, they are actually phonogram sequences. Shakunage
then got shortened to shaku or shako, and the latter
was then respelled as Chinese 蝦蛄 'mantis shrimp'.

If 石楠花 ~ 石南花 shakunage and 蝦蛄 shako are actually
native Japanese words in sinographic disguise, their sha is in
need of explanation since sha is normally only in loanwords. A
major exception is 喋る shaberu
'to chat', a modern, common colloquial word whose origin is unknown to
me.

A shift of -u to -o is unusual in Japanese. I can't
think of any examples. Normally the vowel shift goes the other way
around: -o > -u. So I wonder if shako is
actually a more conservative form and if the association with shakunage
was the product of later confusion. Shaku would then be a
clipped form of shakunage or from shako with vowel
raising. However, normally o-raising is not in final position,
so that might favor the clipping hypothesis. I don't have the
dialectological background needed to solve this problem.

3.7.6:41: Wiktionary lists Sino-Japanese Go-on
readings ge and ku for 蝦
and 蛄, but my policy is to regard Sino-Japanese readings as
hypothetical unless they occur in attested words. So many readings in
dictionaries are generated on the basis of fanqie and knowledge
of the general patterns of the two major strata of Sino-Japanese, Go-on
and Ka-on. I don't know of any words in which 蝦 and 蛄 are read as ge
and ku, so I only list ga, ka, and ko here on
the basis of 蝦蟇 gama 'toad', 魚蝦 gyoka
'fish and shrimp', and 蟪蛄 keiko 'a kind of cicada'.

There is no single way a brain becomes “rewired,” explains
Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of UCLA’s Center for
Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice. The process happens
differently, depending on how we read. Readers of Chinese (an
ideographic language) rewire differently from those who read Spanish
(a logographic one).

It upsets me for three reasons.

First, languages can't be characterized by their writing systems.

Second, the Chinese script isn't "ideographic"; no writing system
is. It isn't really "logographic" either, though that term is less
wrong than "ideographic", as there is a partial correlation between
Chinese words and Chinese characters.

Third, Spanish orthography is not "logographic"; Spanish is written
in an alphabet, not a script with thousands of characters for words or
morphemes. Strictly speaking, no writing system is logographic either -
there are too many words in any language (Toki Pona aside)
for the
one-character-per-word principle to be viable.

Today I learned Canada has its own
Ukrainian dialect. I was surprised to see cash register
borrowed as a spelling-based кеш реґистер (?) kesh régyster
rather than as a pronunciation-based кеш реджистер †kesh rédzhyster.

1. Not that it matters much, but when I tried to copy and paste
'pig' from the last day of the pig,
I discovered that entry was missing from my index
page! I've restored
it; it'll eventually disappear after the entry preceding it does. As
far as I know, I've never accidentally deleted an entry between entries
like that before.

2. I'm stuck in Pirahã (P; getting tired of typing the tilde) mode
now. It could be worse. I've only glanced at Daniel L. Everett's Don't
Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
(2008). I'll read the whole thing eventually - I have two books to
finish. I don't want to get too involved with Pirahã. But a glimpse of
any language can offer data for future use, and so here I jot my notes
on the little I've seen based on the sketch on pp. xi-xii in his book.

2a. Vowels

Here are the allophones:

/i/
[ɪ] ~ [ɛ] ~ [i]

/o/ [u] ~ [o]

/a/ [ɑ]

Here are the allophones in order of apparent frequency:

Phoneme \ frequency

1st

2nd

3rd

/i/

[ɪ]

[ɛ]

[i]

/o/

[u]

[o]

/a/

[ɑ]

And here is a chart of the allophones:

Front

Back

[i]

[u]

[ɪ]

(gap 2)

(gap 1)

[o]

[ɛ]

(gap 4)

(gap 3)

[ɑ]

/i o/ constitute a class. They are the only vowels with allophonic
variation and the only vowels that condition consonantal allophony (see
below).

I don't know why o was chosen to symbolize the nonlow back
vowel if its most frequent allophone is [u].

I am surprised there are no allophones [e] and [ʊ] (gaps 1-2). Are
the P careful to avoid those vowels, or is Everett's description
simplified?

The absence of [æ] and [ɔ] (gaps 3-4) may be motivated by the need
to preserve 'buffer space' between /i o/ and /a/; such vowels combine
characteristics of /i o/ and /a/.

2b. Consonants

Here are the allophones of the two most interesting consonants:

Phoneme

initially

between /i/ and /o/

elsewhere

/g/

[n]

[ɺ͡ɺ̼] or [g]

[g]

/b/

[m]

[ʙ]

[b]

/s/ palatalizes to [ʃ] before /i/.

The remaining consonants do not have allophony in Everett's
introductory account: /ʔ h k t p/. (I won't go into the issue of
whether [k] is really an allophone of [h].)

The two voiced consonants can be regarded as front and back. (I
almost wrote labial and nonlabial, but t'nonlabial' /g/ in fact has a linguolabial
allophone [ɺ͡ɺ̼]; the subscript 'seagull' indicates linguolabiality.)

The nonlow vowels condition nonstop allophones of the voiced
consonants: the lateral flap [ɺ͡ɺ̼] and the trill [ʙ]. I wanted to say
continuant allophones, but Wikipedia says,

Whether laterals, taps/flaps, or trills are continuant
is not conclusive.

Are /g b/ the results of a merger of a larger set of earlier voiced
consonants?

- Were there originally three voiced consonants */g d b/?

- /g/ could be a merger of */g/ and */d/

- an earlier initial nasal allophone [ŋ] of /g/ could have
merged with [n].

- [ɺ͡ɺ̼] could have originally been the /i o/-allophone of */d/

- this lateral flap allophone may in turn be a merger of an
original *liquid and a lenited allophone of */d/; cf. how Korean
intervocalic /r/ is a blend of the liquids *r and *l
and lenited *t

- [g] could have originally been the /i o/-allophone of /g/

- Were nasals */ŋ n m/ originally distinct from stops */g d b/?

Looking at what little remains of P's extinct relatives may help to
answer these questions. The initial consonant of Yahahí ~
Jahahí is intriguing, as P has nothing like it (anymore?).